John Onians
A New Geography of Art InstitutionsThe new geography of art institutions offered here is itself proof of the importance of the subject. Being inspired by my experience of a new art museum, it is a demonstration that we should take such institutions seriously. If we don’t, we risk not understanding culture. What is true of local institutions is even truer of institutions globally. This is why we need to study them geographically.
The gallery that inspired me to develop a new geography of art institutions is the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Its opening in 1978 presented myself and my colleagues at the University of East Anglia with a substantial problem. We, like the faculty members of virtually all art history departments in Europe, were all specialists in post-Classical European art, but the objects in the collection given to us by Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury came from all over the world, often from prehistoric and preliterate cultures. They engaged us powerfully, both emotionally and intellectually, but what they awakened in us most forcefully was a sense of our ignorance. Slowly they compelled us, first, to expand our curriculum to cover other areas of the globe and, eventually, to change the name of the department. By 1992, fourteen years after their arrival, the objects in the Sainsbury Collection had made us expand our teaching and research to match their chronological and geographical range. We ceased to be the School of Art History and became the School of World Art Studies.
This change had many consequences for us all. It encouraged us to abandon the assumptions on which the existing disciplines dealing with art were built, whether the more traditional art history, archaeology, or anthropology, or the more modern visual and cultural studies, and it empowered us to open a whole series of new enquiries, one of these being a study of the importance of art institutions, especially art museums. After all, if one museum had changed our lives, it was well worth studying others around the world to understand their role in the shaping of culture. And that was the inspiration for the two initiatives that provide the basis for the rest of this paper. One of these is the Atlas of World Art, which I was commissioned to edit by the publisher Laurence King in 1996 and which came out in English in 2004, in German in 2005, and in French, Italian, and Spanish in 2006. The other is the World Art Library, for which I obtained funding from the Getty Foundation, and which has been built up since 1995 as a collection of publications designed to document, not the history of art familiar to the European and North American tradition, but the variety of interests in art worldwide. Not that art museums were the focus of either enterprise, but the agenda of each project resulted in the collection of a large amount of information on the field. It is that information which forms the basis for the new geography of art institutions presented here.
The Atlas of World Art Museums figure particularly prominently in the Atlas because of the way I defined its goals, which I envisaged as reframing the study of art. There seemed no point in having an Atlas that simply mapped the history of art as it is familiar to us. Rather, if we were really going to make good our ignorance, we should try to map all the artistic activity of Homo Sapiens from the time that our ancestors first made visually interesting artifacts 40-30,000 years ago until today. Nor did I want the Atlas to concentrate only on the making of such artifacts. Each of the sixty-eight contributors who made the Atlas’ two-page spreads was asked to record not just the activity of the making of such objects, but the sources, whether local or remote, of the materials of which they were made, as well as what happened to them after they were made, including their use by the community, their appropriation or purchase by others, and their eventual destination. It was, above all, this mapping of where objects ended up that led to the mapping of museums.
The Atlas’ survey of artistic activity is divided into seven periods and it was in the last two of these, the periods 1800 to 1900, and 1900 to 2000 that the information on museums acquired real richness. In each period the Atlas begins with the Americas and the discussion here can do the same. The spread for North America 1860-1900, prepared by Jonathan Meuli, thus documents a vast migration of artifacts to the major museums and private collections of the East Coast of the United States, with many different types of European art being brought westwards across the Atlantic at the same time as even larger numbers were being taken eastwards from the indigenous communities who had made them in the desert South West and the Pacific North. Almost equally striking was the contemporary wave of museum-building in Central and Eastern Europe documented by Stefan Muthesius. Evidently, the areas both to the west and to the east of Western Europe were trying to catch up with the countries there, which had long traditions of building major collections. A particular fashion, both across the Atlantic and to the east were the applied art museums, which were seen as a necessary support for the economically vital new area of industrial design.
It was, though, only on the pages of the Atlas dealing with the twentieth century, and especially with its latter half, that art museums become an omnipresent symptom of cultural competition. Some patterns of museum building stand out as we turn the globe. In North America, the spreads by Peter Kalb reveal how the first half of the twentieth century is marked by a wave of municipal art museums spreading across the United States from Buffalo to Los Angeles, while in the second half it is the turn of private institutions such as the Guggenheim in New York, the Kimbell in Fort Worth or the Getty in Los Angeles, their individualistic origins expressed in the personality of their designs by famous architects. One way that older museums sought to draw attention back to themselves was by organizing significant temporary exhibitions, such as “Post Painterly Abstraction” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (1964) or “Sensation,” Brooklyn Museum of Art (1999). Another feature of the United States in the mid-twentieth century was the building of galleries, such as the Whitney, New York, 1964-6 or the East Building of the National Gallery, Washington D.C., (1976), to celebrate a national American art. Then, perhaps partly in reaction to such establishment statements and in response to the protests of 1968, significant alternative art institutions were set up for particular interest groups, such as Womanhouse in Los Angeles or the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, both of 1971 or Art against Aids (1987).
In Central America, mapped by Norman Bancroft-Hunt, the United States of Mexico was the only country to match the United States to the north with its Museo de Palacio de Bellas Artes (1934) and Museo de Arte Moderno (1942). It also came up with its own contributions to the history of art museums with two phenomena that upstaged such traditional institutions in the name of the belief that the most important art of Mexico was not that of the European invaders but of the indigenous population. One was the wave of Muralism launched by Siqueiros in a manifesto of 1922 in the name of a revival of ancient temple decorations, and another the charismatic Museo Nacional de Antropologia opened in 1964. In South America the spread by Isobel Whitelegg documents a similar complication of the mainstream tradition of European art, with museums of Bellas Artes and of Arte Moderna flourishing in the newly rich countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, set against both the work of muralists in the poorer Colombia and Bolivia and the general category of Arte Popolar, which receives a map all to itself.
